Ditchwater Tales by Moderator Robert Michael Pyle

Discussion Topic: The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland

Everyone who opens a book, I suspect, is looking for a story. And everyone who steps outdoors in the morning, senses open, is bound to find one. When we get together and talk about the wild spots, wild creatures, and wild times of our youths, back when we lived as wildlings ourselves at least now and then, what we do is to tell stories, back and forth. When I ask people at gatherings about their own places and times that made them who they are, invariably they are eager to tell tales spawned of those times and places. Of course, that's what The Thunder Tree is: a gathering of narratives, large and small, from the artificial watercourse that was the fountain of my youth. I have always thought of this book not as a memoir of myself, but of those waters and lands, told through the lens of my own stories and those of others for whom that particular old ditch has mattered. And in that sense, these ditchwater tales connect my place, and my life, to yours.

It has been an honor to discuss The Thunder Tree on Wild Read. I mentioned at the beginning of these essays that our goings-forth as children gifted with the freedom of the day often involved some element of risk. It's that very quality (Will the train come before the kids cross the trestle? Are there rocks or snappers under the surface of the swimming hole? Will the bullies (or worse) be lying in wait behind the hedge?) that gives story its essential tension. Most of our risks were small ones: farmers and ditch-riders intent upon our being elsewhere, Big Kids with designs on our allowance or magpie eggs, fragile tree limbs and high pipes to cross, and the like. But the risk turned personal and serious one sultry afternoon in 1954, when the great hailstorm of July 27 reduced the roofs of our young subdivision to pebbled pulp. You can read the details in the first chapter of the book, if you wish; but the outcome was that my older brother Tom, 11, saved our lives by tugging me, 7, into the great hollow cottonwood that gave the book its name.

No doubt that sounds hyperbolic. Tom and I grew up believing (and repeating) that another kid had actually been killed by the hail, trying to hide beneath a tractor in the field next to us. Well, I'm a conservative when it comes to fiction vs. non-fiction; our memories are all different, but I believe that if we're going to call something non-fiction, it should actually have happened that way according to our own lights. If we're going to make something up whole-cloth, fine, but call it fiction. So I researched the hailstorm carefully, and while most of my sense of the facts held up (hail the size of softballs, and so on), there was no evidence of a fatality. When I brought it up with George Swan, the very ditchrider who used to throw us out of the canal, then in his nineties, he confirmed that no kid had been killed. "But you knew about the cattle, right?" he asked. It seems half a dozen cows had been killed by the hailed, brained or back-broken, and he'd had to deal with the carcasses. So the story was even better, with no kid lost; and the risk had been real.

What stories will this hollow tree spawn?

Naturally, the hailstorm became one of the main narratives of our lives; the hollow tree, one of the great icons (it was already the center of our available universe). In just such a way, stories themselves save us: save us from taking the days, and the world, for granted. There is no sharper key for engagement than Surprise with what comes up, and how it works out. And though there is no excuse for boredom in this fecund world, the best antidote when it threatens has always been story. This is why I feel today that the old ditch saved my life not just on July 27, 1954, but over and over again. It wound through our days, warp and woof as one, giving texture and discovery and solace and surprise, whenever I walked its dusty loops. My first writing came from there. And ever since, when I have attempted to "make words fast on paper" (as Sequoyah, creator of the Cherokee alphabet, put it), my stories have flowed directly out of that canal and all of the wild places that have succeeded it.

As I conclude my hitch as Wild Read's wildwriter, I find myself asking whether the love of land and literature can still save the world; or, if not quite that, then make life more worth living. And I have to answer is yes, I think so. At least we know that writing about what needs to be done has sometimes gotten it done, or moved it closer, or perhaps begun the conversation necessary to getting it done. Re-read Cristina's final posting on trophic cascades and The Wolf's Tooth if you doubt this. "To save the world" is a pretty pretentious idea, and the world doesn't need it anyway. But the gods know that parts of our estate that we have mishandled to our detriment, and that of many other lives, can indeed be restored or repaired, and further such mistakes prevented. This is certainly one reason we write--like Rick Bass and David James Duncan's recent emergency book, the remarkable Heart of the Monster: Why the Pacific Northwest & Northern Rockies Must Not Become an ExxonMobil Conduit to the Alberta Tar Sands.

But we also write (= share our stories) in the hopes of improving upon each day's encounter with life's demands and disappointments. In an unsatisfactory world, a good book can make it better; I know that this has always been one of my own main reasons for writing, the hope of making a personal connection with individual readers, and perhaps improving upon their day. Welcome letters from readers let me know that this sometimes happens. As John McPhee said in an interview "How else can I know that anyone really reads the books, or cares?" But just as letters are growing rare, readers too are thinning out. A terrific recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr (Norton), shows how, thanks to neuroplasticity and our new habits, many people are losing the ability and inclination to cope with longer texts and "deep reading." Yet there are signs that some people are recognizing the insidious suck of the shallows, and are throwing lifelines back to books; and some have never left. For my part, as long as I have a sense that my stories may affect others, I will keep writing them. And reading, of course. Because it is only through that magic mix of wildness and words, told back and forth across the fire, the printed page, or even the screen, that we can learn to love the world enough.

Final questions:
Do your childhood memories suggest a central story, about which all the others revolve?

Is literature becoming a bygone among those you know?

Do you ever write to writers whose work has mattered to you? Do! It matters to them. And thank you for reading my posts.

Consider the Magpie by Moderator Robert Michael Pyle

Discussion Topic: The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland

"Maaag!  Maaag!  Merk?"  For background on this communique, I would ask
you to read the chapter "Magpie Days,"  and to ask yourself this: how
would I tell others about an animal that deeply affected me?

I asked myself that about the black-billed magpie.  It was important to
me to convey our stories--those of myself and my big brother Tom--about
these birds in our young lives, but also reliably to convey their
natural history, and the dark tale of their persecution.  But these elements spring from both left and right brains--the personal/subjective (associative, heartful, emotional) and the factual/objective (scientific, reportorial, analytical).  On the face of it, that would seem to present the writer with a conundrum.  But must it?  Not at all.  As Vladimir Nabokov suspected (and lived), there IS a "high ridge where the mountainside of scientific knowledge joins the opposite slope of artistic imagination."  So by striding or soaring along that ridge, dipping into one side, then the other, one ought to be able to do both
in the same essay--and it ought to be all the richer for it, if one's context is clear enough to signal the reader when poet and reporter change places.

At least, that was my experiment with this essay.  So as you read it, note how I have interlarded deeply personal experiences, some funny and some anything but, with historical and biological sequences to try to give a rounded portrait of the bird and its lifeways, as well as the lifeways of two kids on adventure in the world: story holding hands with science.  See if that collaboration across the mental membrane works for
you.  Writing or telling story this way, we invoke what we know or can discover, from Audubon reporting on Clark and Lewis (maybe the last time they were referred to that way) to modern ornithology texts, from bounty figures of benighted days of yore to the color of a '55 Chevy: the magpie contains multitudes.  For my part, I felt I came to know magpies, and myself, much better for having essayed such a convergence.

But this missive also has to do with the black-billed magpie itself, in a more than metaphorical way. _Pica pica hudsonia_ is an elegantly adapted organism, perhaps even one that proliferated beyond its former
estate, since and on account of European contact.  Especially after bounty days were over, it became a veritable neighborhood bird in Denver and many another western town, frequenting cemeteries and parks as well as farms and fallowlands.  Yet, it is not infinitely versatile: it occurs in both Great Britain and the Wild West, but omits the eastern U.S. in between.  Clark and Lewis, Audubon wrote, didn't encounter magpies until they reached the Great Bend of the Missouri in April, 1804.  And though it is a crafty urban habitue, a town & country sophisticate, you won't be able to sneak up on it and snatch one of those iridescent tailfeathers, for it remains much more shy than its fellow corvid, the common crow.  As Audubon described it, "When one pursues it openly, it flits along the walls and hedges, shifts from tree to tree, and at length flies off to a distance."

So here is an animal that has proven extraordinarily adaptable, yet definitely has its limiting factors, both ecologically and socially.  Described as everything from an "unscrupulous roysterer" to "a handsome, knowing, resourceful fellow," it has taken some of the most vicious persecution any American animal has faced, and come back to tell about it: "Maaag!  Maaag!  Merk?"  The black-and-white birds called "magpies" in Australia are successful, piebald birds of similar traits, though far removed from _Pica pica_ genetically and evolutionarily.  Yet just as ours do, they repay close observation and contemplation as
creatures--like the kids one used to find at large in the countryside and the vacant lots--that thrived in the post-industrial wasteland, the agricultural aftermath, the second-hand lands, the hand-me-down habitats
left over after we've had our way with the land.  Such organisms show that the urban wild is not only a story of what's been lost; it might tell a story of evolutionary opportunity: of what's coming back someday.
For such an image taken to its logical extent, read Richard Jeffries' _After London_.  There would be magpies there, in sickle-swoop from one cottonwood to another, scrawling their names across the sky in
opalescent ink. And there would be children at liberty in such a land, wandering at will to see what they could find today.

***
Some questions to consider:

--What kind of animal made a deep impression on you as a young creature abroad on the landscape?  How?  And how to tell about it?

--Does the evolutionary gift and necessity of adaptation offer us (who are not magpies) anything worth looking forward to?

--In your experience, can heart and science--or as one friend of mine put it, headbone and hormone--cooperate to make a good story?

--What are some books, who are some writers, who make such an intellectual/emotional mingling work for you as a reader?

So What's Your Ditch? by Moderator Robert Michael Pyle

Photo credit: Thea Linnaea Pyle

Discussion Topic: The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland


People naturally root in place.  Our special places affect us as individuals, as societies, as a species; but what happens when children no longer have such sacred spots to explore?


Welcome to my rendition of America's Wild Read.  I am pleased to be asked to take part, in the train of such a distinguished and compelling series of writers.  I remember when Cristina Eisenberg brought her notes and outline for a book on trophic cascades to discuss with me when I was teaching writing in the University of Montana's Environmental Studies department (which I'll be doing again next spring).  I thought it was a neat idea and a big job.  Christina seemed enthralled, impressive, and entirely up to it.  How exciting now, then, to see how she has brought it through to this important book, so well received.  The discussion she inspired here was deeply engaging, and it's both a challenge and an honor to follow up.  [Editor's note: Read more about Cristina Eisenberg's The Wolf's Tooth: Keystone Species, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity]

While Cristina has been addressing the "big wild" (deep bush, wilderness sensu strictu, the out there), I will be taking my text from the "small wild": what I call the second-hand lands, or hand-me-down habitats, and what British naturalist/writer Richard Mabey wonderfully refers to as "the unofficial countryside."  For while I have always considered protecting the big wild and its biological function to be tops in conservation, I also recognize the enormous value of the little wilds to our lives and culture: hence the subtitle of The Thunder Tree, which is Lessons from an Urban Wildland.  That was the publisher's final choice, of more than fifty subtitles considered; in fact, the decision came so late that different subtitles appeared on the hardcover copyright page (Lessons from a Second-hand Land ) and the jacket and title page!  This was because it was thought to be a hard idea to get across: after all, how can you compare a Denver ditch to the High Rockies?  And yet, I believe most folks understand exactly what this is all about--because almost all had a place as special to them as that ditch was to me.

If you have dipped into The Thunder Tree, you'll know that I refer to this phenomenon under the slogan "Everybody's Ditch."  In my experience, almost all people who feel any sort of close connection to the land can identify a particular patch of ground that caught their hearts and imaginations as children.  And not just naturalists and conservationists: engineers, doctors, laborers, homeworkers, all manner of adults tell me essentially the same story:  they had a special place where they did certain things, and these experiences meant the world to them.   And they were seldom the big wild: rather, a rock, a tree, a back forty, a back yard; a ditch.  And very often, a vacant lot--for what is less vacant to a curious kid than a vacant lot?  What we did there often involved water (damming, diverting, skipping stones), chasing and catching (crawdads, tadpoles, grasshoppers, fireflies), and always, making forts (in Australia, delightfully known as "cubbies").  There was a cultural lingua franca to such exploits.  The Thunder Tree tells mine. 

Many a kind correspondent has taken time to tell me that my stories relate to, or reawaken, their own.  But I used the past tense up there advisedly, because this kind of intimate bonding with place is in danger of fading away.  Due to all the reasons so elegantly limned in Richard Louv's essential work The Last Child in the Woods, children connecting with special places are growing rare: the retreat of habitats from neighborhoods, the organized bizzyness of kids, implantation of an electronic umbilicus at birth, and stranger danger, chief among them.  Even if kids still know such seductive spots, they almost always lack what I call the freedom of the day that most of us--boys and girls--knew: the liberty to go out and explore, unsupervised.  I am currently writing an assignment for Orion that will explore the potential cultural, even evolutionary consequences of such a loss, for they must be great, don't you think?  How can we go from an animal whose young explore and root (in both senses) to one whose offspring live (in Louv's great term) effectively under house arrest, without some sort of profound social outcome?

When I wrote The Thunder Tree, Louv's perfect term Nature-Deficit Disorder lay in the future, along with the Children and Nature Network, and so many other energetic and encouraging responses.  Twenty years later, when Richard kindly wrote the foreword to the new edition of The Thunder Tree, he put it perfectly, speaking of our special spots: "to a child, these places can be doorways into whole galaxies.  They're as important to human experience as wilderness, and formative to nearly every conservationist's consciousness."  Well, my ditch (and the great hollow cottonwood that gave the book its name) certainly were that for me,.  One thing we encounter as small animals afield is risk; another is that special betrayal I call "the extinction of experience," a concept I introduce in chapter nine.  As you walk my ditch with me, weather the catastrophic hailstorm that nearly took my life, and experience my first extinctions, you will think of your own risks, losses, and ways in which your own ditch, or crick, or field, or hollow, underlies your whole life: the place you can blame or bless for being here, and sharing in this very conversation.

Some questions for you to consider;  share answers or other comments if you feel so moved:

1) What kind of a place was your own childhood habitat of convenience and necessity?

2) Can you take yourself back there, almost meditatively, through memory, smell, or story?

3) What did you do there, and how did it matter in your life, then and later?

4) If your special place has changed beyond recognition (and many have), how has that loss affected you as a person; has it helped make you an activist for the land, or alienated you from the agents of change?

5) What do you think happens when children no longer have such sacred (or profane) spots?

6) If it matters to you, how can we give kids the small wilds, and the freedom to explore them?

Discussion Begins September 11 with Author Robert Michael Pyle: The Thunder Tree

"The Green Man of Gray's
River"

WILD READERs!  Learn about the author of Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, The Thunder Tree and other books and essays listed below.  He is our next WILD READ moderator:

Robert Michael Pyle was born and raised in Colorado and has lived in the Pacific Northwest, California, New England, and Great Britain. His undergraduate degree in Nature Perception and Protection and Master of Science in Nature Interpretation from the University of Washington were followed by a doctorate in Ecology and Environmental Studies from Yale University. He has worked as a Ranger-Naturalist for Sequoia National Park, for the wildlife department of Papua New Guinea, as Northwest Land Steward for The Nature Conservancy, and as co-manager of the Species Conservation Monitoring Center of the World Wildlife Fund and IUCN in Cambridge, U.K. In 1971 he founded the international Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and later chaired its Monarch Project.

For thirty years, Pyle has been a full-time freelance writer, teacher, speaker, and biologist. His fifteen books include Wintergreen (John Burroughs medal), The Thunder Tree, Where Bigfoot Walks, Chasing Monarchs, Walking the High Ridge, and Sky Time in Gray’s River as well as The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies and several other standard butterfly works. They have won the John Burroughs Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Governor's Writer's Awards, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award, the Harry Nehls Award for Nature Writing, the National Outdoor Book Award for natural history literature, and have been finalists for the Orion and Washington Book Awards. His latest book, Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year, as runner-up for a 2011 Green Book Award. A novel, Magdalena Mountain, is in progress along with collections of poems and essays. Pyle's popular essay-column, “The Tangled Bank,” appeared in fifty-two consecutive issues of Orion Magazine. He recently placed second for the Obsidian Fiction Prize, judged by Gretel Ehrlich, and fourth in the Idaho Prize for Poetry.

Bob Pyle has taught writing and natural history seminars for many conferences, institutes, and colleges around the world, and presented hundreds of invited lectures and keynote addresses.

In recent years he has served as Visiting Professor of Environmental Writing at Utah State University, Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana, and place-based writing instructor for the Aga Khan Trust for the Humanities in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

He has been named Distinguished Alumnus by both the College of Forest Resources at the University of Washington and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and received a Distinguished Service Award from The Society for Conservation Biology. For thirty years he has lived along Gray's River, a tributary of the Lower Columbia River in southwest Washington State, with his wife, artist and botanist Thea Linnaea Pyle.

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